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Comment by stephendause | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me, or does the PR experience with Github leave a lot to be desired? Unlike some, I don't have a problem with the concept of a PR per se, but I frequently find navigating the various conversations in my PRs more difficult than I feel it should be. If a branch is rebased, then comments on code that was changed get lost, and one has to go the Conversations tab and search for the comment there. I understand that the commit itself is gone, which is fine, but I think an easy way to navigate through the comments, even if their context is lost, would be a great improvement.

I am actually more interested in the suggestion to try VCS alternatives, though. To me, it seems like we have reached a local maximum with git where in principle, better approaches exist, but no one seems to think the cost of switching would be worth it.

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The PR experience on github is crazy bad. The commentary only works for a single round. After the first round of review, nobody can find where/why the comments were placed, or whether/how they were addressed. For me Gerrit is much better.

> If a branch is rebased, then comments on code that was changed get lost

That's probably more related to UX than git itself. I remember Bitbucket (also git) handling these situations better and conversations were much easier to follow, but I haven't used it in a few years so things could have changed.

> I don't have a problem with the concept of a PR

I don't either; the idea of a change-set as the unit of source control works well. My problem is that git doesn't work that way. Every git workflow I've seen, including GitHub PRs, and to a large extent git itself, presents the illusion that a git commit is a change set. When you write a git commit message, you probably write it as if it were describing a set of changes. When you run `git show 21ad6ef3`, git shows you changes, as if `21ad6ef3` referred to those changes. But it doesn't.

The GitHub approach is interesting in that it actually does retain the change-set (PR) as part of the project history. But it's out-of-band with respect to the actual git repository.

> an easy way to navigate through the comments, even if their context is lost, would be a great improvement.

Sounds like you want to filter the conversation view so that you can separate the various things shown there (PR comments, code comments, reviews)? Seems like a useful feature.

Yes, that would be a good way of doing it.

a former employer of mine insisted we use phabricator (self-hosted) instead of github. while I initially fought it because of vpn requirement and UI/UX differences after years of github, I grew to quite like it. in particular the comment organization, handling of back-merges to trunk, and workflow standardization. not sure if it’s still maintained or not though

https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

> Effective June 1, 2021: Phabricator is no longer actively maintained.

Yeah and PRs don't scale well for popular repos with a small number or single maintainer. It's just an unbelievable amount of work to throw code at someone and let them figure out if it's high enough quality, worth integrating and maintaining, etc. It just leads to burn out and abandonment. IMHO there should be much more focus on the branching nature of git and highlight that code can and should live in different user branches.

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